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The Choice of Heracles 



An Ac Vess 

Before the Students of Marion Institute 

and Judson College 

at 

Marion, Alabama, March 3, 1914 



By 
FAIRFAX |IAKRISON 

President, Southern Railway Company 



OCT 2 7 1314 



THE CHOICE OF HERACLES. 

"To the entent that I wyll declare howe gouernours of 
realmes and cities may be prepared, I will use the policie of 
a wyse and counnynge gardener: who purposynge to haue 
in his gardeine a fyne and preciouse herbe, that shulde be 
to hym and all others repairynge thereto, excellently como- 
diouse or pleasant, he will first serche throughout his gar- 
deyne where he can finde the most melowe and fertile erth ; 
and therein wil he put the sede of the herbe to growe and 
be norisshed." — Sir Thomas Elyot. 

It is our pride to term the South conservative, not, as some Philis- 
tines connote the word, with an intendment of what is behind the times, 
but with a congratulatory appreciation that here are a people alive to all 
the real progress of the age in which we live, but still clinging with respect 
to that concept which spells patriotism- — -the subordination of the indi- 
vidual to the community under equal laws. Here, as in few parts of our 
broad United States, men still regard that as good which their fathers 
did because their fathers did it. We live at the end of an old era as well 
as at the beginning of a new. We can still look back with perspective 
while our eyes are beginning to reflect the light of vision of the future. 
With this great privilege of immediate contact with a background of 
which we can well be proud, surrounded by the stately relics of a race 
which moved slowly perhaps, but was guided more by principle than by 
sentiment and emotion — a race which none dares contemn, but all gentle- 
men are bred to honor — it is fitting that the South should equip her 
sons for the contests of the new life with whatever is best in the tradition 
of the past ; that we should pass on the torch our forefathers passed to 
us, if it still illuminates, as I shall today try to maintain that it does. 

Our modern creed tells us that those who laid the foundation of 
our nation demanded too large a sacrifice of the inherent rights of the 
individual to the general good of the commonweal; that for all the fine 
French philosophy of the Declaration of Independence, the government 
which resulted from it was rather a government of Man than of men 
and women ; in fine, that it gave opportunity for the very things it sought 
to overthrow — the growth of classes and special privilege. In our reac- 
tion it may be questioned whether we are not going too far in our con- 
cern for the Individual, and whether a modicum of that kind of education 
which formed the principles of the Fathers might not teach us that, 



after all, the rights of the Individual conservatively might ever be sub- 
jected to such limitation as sentimentality can not be expected to appre- 
ciate, but which wisdom, founded on a knowledge of human history, 
and indeed of Nature herself, can safely impose. One is reminded of a 
philosophical observation by Darwin: 

• 

"Perfect equality among the individuals composing the Fuegian 
tribes must for a long time retard their civilization. As we see 
those animals whose instinct compels them to live in society, and 
obey a chief, are most capable of improvement, so it is with the 
races of mankind. Whether we look at it as a cause or a conse- 
quence, the most civilized always have the most artificial gov- 
ernments." 

There have been three previous periods in the history of the world 
when men, in reaction against the tyranny of classes or of states, were 
actuated by that high passion of idealism for the individual which 
breathed through the last inaugural address which has come to us from 
the Capitol in Washington. The literature of Greece reveals a moment 
when men were freeing themselves from the grip of the state and seeking 
an unrestrained expression of individual rights, with the privilege to 
discover and to explore themselves. It is no longer the age of ^schylus, 
finding its catharsis in the poet's rehearsal of the fortunes and feelings 
of kings and prophets and princely heroines — it is the age of Euripides 
the disintegrator, who searched the heart of personal experience and 
gave a poignant expression to what he discovered. He in turn yielded 
the stage to Menander and the unheroic emotions of Everyman in the 
New Comedy, just as Browning has given way to Bernard Shaw. 

Again, at the end of the splendid history of the Roman Republic, 
man sought once more to live for himself and no longer for the state. 
Literature ceases to be epic in the old Greek sense; it has become per- 
sonal, esoteric. Catullus plays upon our own private experience as 
freshly as the Lydian waters still laugh on Sirmio, today as when, return- 
ing from Oriental wanderings, he came once more to his beloved Lago 
di Garda. But chiefly do we find the new note in Virgil — no longer the 
stern, compelling eloquence of Ennius, but a sweet sentimentalism which 
a school-girl can understand. 

Once more, at the close of another age — that of feudal Europe — 
do we find men considering intensely the rights, and even more the 
wrongs, of the individual. We are taught to look upon the defense of 



Calas by Voltaire as psychologically the highest moment of a great career 
of illumination. 

It is perhaps unnecessary to suggest that each of these periods of 
divagation of the interests of the citizen from those of the state was fol- 
lowed by a subjugation of the dearest of all individual rights — that of 
political liberty; that Philip and his son put out forever the lamp of 
Greek liberty; that Augustus destroyed the fabric which more than any- 
thing material represented "the grandeur that was Rome" ; that Napoleon 
crushed during a cruel hour a nascent national independence. It is 
equally unnecessary to deduce from what has been said that individuals 
find their freest expression only under personal tyranny, which, depriving 
them of concern in the welfare of all, diverts them to a private fingering 
and fondling of their own souls. It is enough to realize that we are 
living today in another such age of dissent from the standards of the 
past; that our literary prophets drive home disillusion in order to make 
us modern — Ibsen, behind the leering mask of comedy, with the same 
clairvoyance as moved Erasmus or Lucretius. 

Our search is, then, for a gospel which each of us may interpret 
as authority for the freest choice of moral standards; and we hurry 
through all beliefs, dissecting as we go those which have been held in 
the most sacred esteem. We seek natural explanations of those dear 
prejudices which have moved men to wonder and secret sympathy 
through countless ages, and what was religion has for some become 
merely mores, taboos, sun myths — an interesting subject for research, 
but no longer a restraint of conduct. 

And so our modern system of education, discontent with the studies 
which have moved men to high and noble endeavor, prescribes in place 
of them a pabulum of applied science — the most reasonable, as it is the 
most dreary, of the utilities of the modern world. We hear accepted 
leaders of opinion insist that we shall no longer waste our time with 
building of character; that the true end of education is to sharpen our 
wits for the conflict of life, to arm ourselves with weapons of imme- 
diate use. 

All the cry of the schools is of vocational education. The lad who 
has learned to read is to begin, forsooth, at once to prepare himself for 
a trade or even a profession. To study the classics, to drink inspiration 
at the fountains of the past, is no more profitable, we are told, than the 
efforts of Tantalus to slake his thirst. I do not mean to suggest that 
vocational education is without its uses — far from it: but that among 



such men and women as I am addressing today it might well be confined 
to the individual whose bent of mind discovers a probable career as a 
technician. Even if a man is eventually to specialize, he is a sounder 
man if he does so on a solid foundation of tradition. Vocational educa- 
tion as a system for all is what I deplore. It is a sage counsel only for 
the industrially inept, for wage-earning mechanics at the highest, but 
most necessary shall we say for the negro — not for potential leaders of 
men. The trail of it is, however, everywhere evident, even in our higher 
schools and colleges, with the result that we are breeding a race of average 
men whose education operates like a labor union to deprive the best of 
the opportunity of his natural equipment, and to reduce efficiency to a 
level attainable by the incompetent. This is responsible for the most-to- 
be-regretted type in our industrial life today — the man in authority who 
is merely an official, competent to enforce rules, diligent, earnest, faithful 
it may be, but incapable of imagining new things. 

With all deference to current opinion to the contrary, I believe with 
old Sir Thomas Elyot that proper education for holding places of author- 
ity is as vital to the welfare of the state as the education of the many. 
As we are now facing new and fundamental questions of politics, of 
social science and economics, there was perhaps never a time when, as a 
nation, we more required leaders of poise and self-restraint, capable of 
bringing to the solution of the new the experience of the old, not that 
they may solve these questions only as they have been solved in the past, 
not that they may resist the pressure of the new, but that they may be able 
to choose what is sound and avoid what is merely specious. 

I yield to none in admiration of the man who knows — the man 
equipped with modern science; but I venture, nevertheless, to assert that 
without background, as he too often is, he may be a narrow man, and in 
very truth plays, after all, but a small part in the world. He can not 
move men to action — he can only facilitate their poor material and human 
convenience, which breeds more wants than it satisfies; he can not stir 
the heart to singing — he can only reckon its pulsations. 

My appeal is, then, to a view of life which will take account of the 
past as well as of the future, in education as in the conduct of affairs 
for which education is the preparation. The object is often made to 
that kind of equipment which is founded largely upon study of the 
humanities, that such a man enters life a mere amateur. He knows 
nothing useful, and so, it is said, he is unfit for industry, which in our 
age and in our civilization is the chief end of life, and so of education; 



that, for example, in international commercial competition he is putty in 
the hands of a technically trained German. I venture, however, to main- 
tain the thesis that a man with a literary education is as well equipped 
to lead the industrial world as is a vocationally educated physicist or 
mechanical engineer of similar natural parts and character. It is a famil- 
iar experience in industry, as it is practised today, to see the man who 
has little or no special training in science — indeed, alas ! sometimes little 
education of any kind outside of the school of experience — leading suc- 
cessfully some great industry, solving its problems with full use of all 
the mysteries of applied science, and reaping the rewards of power and 
honor which come with successful leadership. How he does this is not 
far to seek. He hires the specialist as he requires him, and that too, 
unfortunately for current educational theory, usually at a comparatively 
small wage. He does not himself need to know what others can tell; 
he can use technical men as he uses a table of logarithms. But, for 
leadership in its largest aspect, he does need a personal and ever available 
equipment of high principle, courage, both moral and physical, and 
imagination — qualities which are native in some characters, but may be 
cultivated in most through touch and contact with the thoughts and 
minds of the great souls who have by those qualities achieved great 
deeds in the past — that immortal company the tradition of whose acts or 
words constitutes the body of literature which we term the classics. 

I urge, then, upon those who would lead in industry, as in other 
conflicts of life, to build character and imagination by the study of the 
humanities. It is, however, no easy school that I counsel, no promenade 
or pasear through the contemporary literature of predigested knowledge — 
the books about books — which crowd our libraries, the ancient history 
drugged with modern politics, not Grote and Mommsen, but Thucydides 
and Tacitus. I summon him who would know and understand 

"the springs 
Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world," 

back to the sources, to the originals in all ages, that by the very labor 
of the search the knowledge may be more securely gained and taste 
the sweeter in achievement. He has weary days and straining nights 
before him, but he has deathless privilege, the communion with great 
souls. Scholarship in its technical sense is not now my subject. It is 
not the life of an Oxford don, nor of a German privatdocent, that I 



hold up to the emulation of a young American who would become a 
captain of industry. The life of a Scaliger, a Casaubon, a Bentley 
would be an anachronism in our teeming world of industry. But from 
such as these there is much more than scholarship to learn. Because 
their tools are those I recommend to him who would know how to lead 
men, and because their methods are those of the painful endeavor which 
alone yields enduring success in any form of human enterprise, their 
lives may be our inspiration as we read the books which their labors 
have made readable. Here, for example, is Joseph Scaliger pleasantly 
pictured for us by his great contemporary Casaubon, ever debonair in 
the use of his hard-won learning: 

"A man who, by the indefatigable devotion of a stupendous 
genius to the acquisition of knowledge, had garnered up vast stores 
of uncommon lore. And his memory had such a happy readiness 
that, whenever the occasion called for it, whether it were in con- 
versation or whether he were consulted by letter, he was ready to 
bestow with lavish hand what had been gathered by him in the sweat 
of his brow." 

So it is that true classical study can never be dilettantism. "Not 
without dust and heat" may one obtain a literary education which may 
serve in the practical life to come. I will take the liberty of illustrating 
my point by a version from one of the books I recommend. It is the 
old, old parable of the joy which comes in work, as Prodicus the Sophist 
wrote and polished and read it to numberless audiences of young Greeks 
in the great fifth century, and was commended therefor by Socrates. 
Its moral is today no less pertinent than is its charm of expression, 
though the full measure of that charm must, indeed, be sought in the 
Greek original. It is the parable of The Choice of Heracles. 

"When Heracles wjgjs emerging from boyhood into the bloom of 
youth, having reached that season in which the young man, now 
standing upon the verge of independence, shows plainly whether 
he will enter upon the path of virtue or of vice, he went forth into 
a quiet place and sat debating with himself which of these two 
paths he should pursue ; and as he there sat musing, there appeared 
to him two women of great stature which drew nigh to him. The 
one was fair to look upon, frank and free by gift of nature, her 
limbs adorned with purity and her eyes with bashfulness ; sobriety 
set the rhythm of her gait, and she was clad in white apparel. The 



other was of a different type: the fleshy softness of her limbs 
betrayed her nurture, while the complexion of her skin was em- 
bellished that she might appear whiter and rosier than she really 
was, and her figure that she might seem taller than nature had 
made her; she stared with wide-open eyes, and the raiment where- 
with she was clad served but to reveal the ripeness of her bloom. 
With frequent glances she surveyed her person, or looked to see if 
others noticed her ; while ever and anon she fixed her gaze upon the 
shadow of herself intently. 

"Now when these two had drawn near to Heracles, she who was 
first named advanced at an even pace towards him, but the other, 
in her eagerness to outstrip her, ran forward to the youth, exclaim- 
ing, "I see you, Heracles, in doubt and difficulty what path of life 
to choose ; make me your friend and I will lead you to the pleasant- 
est road and the easiest. This I promise you: you shall taste all of 
life's sweets and escape all bitters. In the first place, you shall not 
trouble your brain with war or business ; other topics shall engage 
your mind : your only speculation, what meat or drink you shall 
find agreeable to your palate ; what delight of ear or eye ; what 
pleasure of smell or touch ; how you shall pillow your limbs in 
softest slumber; how cull each individual pleasure without alloy of 
pain ; and if ever the suspicion steal upon you that the stream of 
joys will one day dwindle, trust me, I will not lead you where you 
shall replenish the store by toil of body and trouble of soul. No! 
others shall labor, but you shall reap the fruit of their labors ; you 
shall withhold your hand from nought which shall bring you gain. 
For to all my followers I give authority and power to help them- 
selves freely from every side.' 

"Heracles, hearing these words, made answer : 'What, O lady, is 
the name you bear?' To which she: 'Know that my friends call me 
Happiness, but they that hate me have their own nicknames for 
me- — Vice and Naughtiness.' 

"But just then the other of those fair women approached and 
spoke: 'Heracles, I too am come to you, seeing that your parents 
are well known to me, and in your nurture I have gauged your 
nature ; wherefore T entertain good hope that if you choose the 
path which leads to me, you shall greatly bestir yourself to be the 
doer of many a doughty deed of noble emprise ; and that I too shall 
be held in even higher honor for your sake, lit with the lustre shed 
by valorous deeds. I will not cheat you with preludings of pleasure, 
but I will relate to you the things that are according to the ordinances 
of God in very truth. Know then that among things that are 
lovely and of good report, not one have the gods bestowed upon 
mortal man apart from toil and pains. Would you obtain the favor 
of the gods, then must you pay these same gods service; would you 
be loved by your friends, you must benefit these friends ; do you 



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desire to be honored by the state, you must give the state your aid ; 
do you claim admiration for your virtue from all Hellas, you must 
strive to do some good to Hellas ; do you wish earth to yield her 
fruits to you abundantly, to earth you must pay your court; do 
you seek to amass riches from your flocks and herds, on them must 
you bestow your labor ; or is it your ambition to be potent as a 
warrior, able to save your friends and subdue your foes, then must 
you learn the arts of war from those who have the knowledge, 
and practise their application in the field when learned ; or would 
you e'en be powerful of limb and body, then must you habituate 
limbs and body to obey the mind, and exercise yourself with toil 
and sweat. . . . Toils like these, O Heracles, son of noble 
parents, it is yours to meet with, and, having endured, to enter into 
the heritage assured you of transcendent happiness.' " 

These are immanent lessons of success in a selfish world, but the 
fierce joy which comes of consciousness of work well done is not the only 
reward of him who builds his character upon the humanities. He who 
equips himself for life with an education of science, but with "small 
Latin and less Greek," what is his intellectual resource in his hours of 
ease and divertisement? If he is a banker, like Sir John Lubbock, he 
can doubtless amuse his leisure with ants and bees ; but if he is an 
entomologist for his livelihood, he can not reasonably expect diversion 
in banking as an avocation : it is probable that the Comptroller of the 
Currency might intervene with an awful veto. But he who has founded 
his career upon a study of the great dead whom we term the classics, 
has not only a fund of experience and tradition of achievement to guide 
and stimulate his workaday life, but, when work is done, he has a sweet 
well of imagination to dip into, vastly to be preferred to the muck of a 
modern literature of unrest and sordid discontent. He may betake him- 
self to that wonderful isle of the poet's conjuring, there to invite his 
soul and refresh his faculties. He, too, can live in Arcady. 

"And I have fitted up some chambers there 
Looking towards the golden Eastern air 
And level with the living winds, which flow 
Like waves above the living waves below. 
I have sent books and music there, and all 
Those instruments with which high Spirits call 
The future from its cradle, and the past 
Out of it? ^ravc, and make the present last 
In thoughts and joys which sleep, but can not die. 
Folded within their own eternity." 

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